Oh, I’m a Jew being hatcheted in the Daily Mail. So I must be doing something right

April 10, 2018

by Martin Odoni

FOREWORD: I shall admit in advance that the title above is slightly misleading, as I am not the person being hatcheted as such.

“Fame at last”, eh?

That bastion of journalistic bastardisation, the Daily Mail, with its long history of racism and anti-Semitism, has been getting very sanctimonious over the last few weeks about supposed anti-Semitism among other people. Yesterday, it seems, I was one of the would-be ‘anti-Semites’ in question. Seriously. The Mail has published(oh! How dirty I feel linking to a page on that website!) an attack on a Labour councillor called Dorian Bartley, who in turn published social media posts comparing Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the Führer of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. This has been spun as ‘anti-Semitic’, and as usual with these sorts of attacks, that is quite a stretch; once more, anti-Semitism’s definition is being expanded to encompass all opposition to Israeli policy and politicians. But a little way down the same page, the following image can be seen of a link Bartley shared on social media; –

The Daily Mail has made me famous!

Bartley’s link was to the article I wrote a couple of weeks back dismissing the allegations of anti-Semitism against the ‘Brick Lane mural’. Now that article really went viral. At almost 65,000 hits, it has been read more than twice as often as the second most popular article on this blog, which is otherwise usually a quiet sound in a noisy room. So if we are to assume that Bartley is an anti-Semite for sharing it, then there must be an awful lot of anti-Semites in the United Kingdom. Obviously I should run for my Jewish life!

Daily Mail deceitfulness

What I note about this is how perfectly it encapsulates the cynical deceitfulness of the Mail and its style of reporting. It is hardly going to be a revelation to readers of my blog, I am sure, when I suggest that the Mail is not a newspaper but a hate-rag, and its hypocrisy about racism, given its history, is too stark to be worth the bother of getting angry about. But that this reversal would go so far as to use publication of the work of a Jewish writer as evidence of anti-Semitism requires some serious gonads.

It is more than that, however. All the Mail writer, Kate Ferguson, did was take a screencap of a bit of Bartley’s Facebook timeline. She did not offer a link to my article about the mural, so that readers could assess it for themselves and judge whether it really was credible evidence for Bartley’s ‘anti-Semitism’. Moreover, Ferguson either did not read the article I wrote, or she decided to avoid all mention of certain details – especially the fact that I stated quite explicitly in it that I am ethnically Jewish. It is not impossible to be prejudiced against one’s own race, but it is very counter-intuitive, and so it would have undermined Ferguson’s very obvious aim, which was to use Bartley’s suspension to add fuel to the ‘anti-Semitism-in-the-Labour-Party’ fire. She offered no specific quotations from my article either, which again should, I hope, raise alarm bells in the minds of healthy skeptics who have not yet read it. But also, note the rather amusing irony of what she wrote: –

And [Bartley] shared a post defending the mural which sparked the recent protests against Jeremy Corbyn – contradicting the Labour leader who admitted it was.

The sentence above is not only a classic example of appalling grammar – Ferguson wrote nothing to specify what Corbyn admitted. It should also make people laugh that the Daily Mail, and the rest of the mainstream media, spent the last three years telling everybody that Jeremy Corbyn is wrong about pretty near everything, and now tell us that we must accept that the mural was anti-Semitic, because Jeremy Corbyn has said that it was. (In this case, Corbyn is wrong. It was not. But his error in this instance is the exception rather than the rule.)

Keeping the anti-Semitism narrative alive

This latest chapter reeks of desperation to keep the anti-Semitism narrative alive. There are signs, given the damp squib of the demonstration by the Campaign Against Anyone Being Allowed To Speak About IsraeliAtrocities, sorry, I mean the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, on Sunday, that the furore is starting to fizzle out. (The CAA‘s laughable claim that the turn-out for the protest was over 2,000, when it was not a great deal more than 200, only serves to highlight once more how dishonest that ‘charity’ is.) Although this tiny protest was given ridiculously excessive coverage in the media – protests against the Conservative Party Conference regularly draw crowds in excess of 50,000 but seldom get any national coverage at all – the desperate attempt to talk up the occasion has led to a new pretence. That is, pretending that Maureen Lipman once again publicly martyring herself, by announcing that she is leaving the Labour Party, is some kind of big deal.

Yes! Yes, everyone! Let me repeat that for you, so you can all take in this mammoth development worthy of mention alongside the Moon Landings for its gargantuan impact on human history. Maureen Lipman says she is going to leave the Labour Party.

Yes, that was pretty much my reaction too.

Oh, come on, British media! Do you seriously imagine anyone cares which party Lipman supports? (Do most people even remember her for anything other than those irritating British Telecomcommercials from the 1980’s?) Lipman previously claimed during Ed Miliband’s time as leader that she was leaving Labour, but apparently did not. So one cannot help but feel that there is an echo of ‘child-running-away-from-home-hoping-it-gets-her-more-attention-from-mummy-and-daddy‘ about it. Whether she stays or leaves, Lipman has one of the most perverse and twisted perspectives on Israel/Palestine in the UK. She thinks that Labour’s position of favouring a homeland for the Palestinians is ‘anti-Semitic and racist’. This is of course nonsense. Lipman’s opposition to a homeland for the Palestinians is anti-Arab and racist. She is therefore acting a little like the Daily Mail, in her reversal of plain reality.

Zionism – a failed ideology

Lipman’s hate-enriched bigotry is not about protecting Jews, it is about protecting the gains of Zionism. Not only is that immoral, given what was taken from Palestinian Arabs to make those gains a reality, it is also foolish. This is because Zionism is an example of what is often called ‘a failed ideology’. Its aim was to give Jewish people a country of their own, so any Jew facing persecution anywhere in the world would have a safe space to which (s)he could retreat. The reason this ideology is a failure is self-evident; Israel is an unsafe place for Jews in which to live.

As I wrote last year, this conclusion is objectively true, at least if we accept the present Zionist narrative of Israeli policy being a necessity to combat dangerous and hostile neighbours. The establishment of Israel after World War II has not made its occupants safe from anti-Semitism. All it has done is move the hostility largely (certainly not completely) away from Europe, and transplanted the brunt of it into the Middle East. Israel being unceremoniously ‘landed’ on the space previously occupied by the British Mandate of Palestine has led to bitter resentment, not just among Palestinians, but also neighbouring Arab countries. Whether one feels that resentment is justified or not, it is there, and it has hardened to differing extents across the region into anti-Semitic feeling. Therefore, Jews living in Israel are major targets for anti-Semitism.

This is ironic from a British angle. I suspect that, as ‘assimilates’ (as right-wing Israelis seem distastefully fond of labelling members of the Jewish diaspora), I and my family are safer from anti-Semitic violence here in the UK than we would be if we lived in Israel. Hence why I doubt that Zionism was necessary, and also why I contend that it has never really succeeded. If the point of Zionism was to create a safe space for any Jews to flee to from persecution, but the resultant nation of Israel is under constant threat, then it is time that Jews and Zionists around the world faced a sad reality; Zionism simply does not do what it says on the tin. If anything, it has renewed a problem that was partly-evaporated by the worldwide horror felt at the Nazi Holocaust.

‘World’s most moral army’ shoots teenagers in the back

If Zionism is not anti-Semitic in itself – and its acquiescence to the idea that Jews should be kept away from gentiles would suggest that it is – then it certainly results from anti-Semitism, and even provokes more of it. This is before we even take into account the appalling anti-Arab racism In Israel, which stubbornly manifests itself in the bloodthirsty way the Israeli Defence Force treats Palestinian protesters, even over the last two weeks. That British Zionists can persist in the fiction that the Israeli Army is ‘the most moral in the world’ after what has happened on the boundary of the Gaza Strip since ‘Land Day’ requires mental techniques that go beyond Orwellian doublethink.

The bullying anti-Arab racist, English Defence League sympathiser, and former vice-President of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain & Ireland, Jonathan Hoffman, claims that the IDF is the most moral army in the world while its troops shoot unarmed Palestinian teenagers in the back.

Somehow, I doubt the complexities and nuance of the real discussion of this subject will ever be properly explored in the mainstream British media in my lifetime. It is far more click-bait-friendly to reduce the matter to the simple-minded, black-and-white, “If-you-oppose-Israel-then-you-hate-Jews” narrative so beloved of the British Zionist lobby. And if that narrative requires viciously telling Jews who oppose Israel that they are traitors who hate themselves, or that they are ‘the wrong kind of Jew‘, then it will continue to happen. As is always the way with these matters, what makes money is what decides.

While I am a Jew, I am not a Zionist, nor an Israel-supporter. I am also not a traitor, nor a self-hater. If that confuses people at the Daily Mail or their gullible readers, I suggest they learn to live with it. I am not going to change my moral or intellectual positions just to make it easier for the ignorant to slot different social groups into handy categories.